Bloodtide

by Melvin Burgess

  The great hall of the Galaxy Building was the natural venue for such a feast. This vast internal space, hung with cobwebs, open to the winds in its upper reaches, where pigeons, jackdaws and swifts nested, was still a wonder of the world. The air conditioning had been broken this hundred years since and mists and haze formed up by the ceiling, half a mile overhead. Out of sight, the plastic panels peeled away, polystyrene stuffing flaked little snowfalls down, mortar crumbled, surfaces grew thick with dead spiders and flies and dust and plain old dirt; but somehow the squalor only added to its glory.

  In the centre of it all, the lift shaft, like a thread of spider’s silk, spun into the mist and out of sight.

  The lift shaft ran from the deep basements below, where Val’s ludicrous wealth was hoarded, right up to the building’s broken tip. It was so long, glass-like and brittle-looking that first-time visitors often lifted their hands involuntarily above their heads and ducked, certain that it was in the act of snapping and that a million razor-sharp shards were about to rain down upon them. But the old builders had made it from the strongest stuff on heaven and earth. No one had ever even managed to scratch it.

  The lift hadn’t worked for generations, but the shaft had a new use. Val used the impossible gleaming thread as a kind of temple. In here he hung his human sacrifices. They dangled like fruit among the wires and cables until they rotted and fell to pieces and their bones gathered in heaps at the bottom. There were new ones up today, glaring down at the diners with one heel nailed to a beam, their hands tied behind their backs and one leg crossed behind the other. The glass had been polished until it shone.

  Ben once reckoned he could get the lift working again, given a few days and a box of tricks. He wired a generator up to it and got huge yellow sparks and leaps of blue flashing up and down the silvery glass and crackling among the cables and the sizzling dead. Some of the bodies began twitching and burning. There were strange noises; some people heard singing. Val ordered Ben to turn it off.

  ‘The dead don’t need to go anywhere, and they have nothing to say,’ he said. ‘Nothing that I want to hear, anyhow,’ he added. Later, Ben wondered if making the dead dance and sing hadn’t offended the gods who were slowly coming back to life. But Val wouldn’t have thought like that. He’d have said, ‘If you kill you’d better expect to die, but you’d better die well.’

  There had never been so many people under that roof – and what people! Gangmen, smugglers, security chiefs, traders, all the rich and powerful. Outside on the streets, when you saw the poverty you wouldn’t believe that such wealth could exist. But the rich are always with us. These were the most fortunate, the cleverest, the most cunning and unscrupulous men and women of two nations, the Volsons and the Conors. People who had done their best to slaughter each other for generations now sat down to eat the same food.

  On a raised platform just before the lift shaft sat the two families themselves, the Volsons and the Conors. Symbolically, Signy was sitting between Val and Conor. Siggy, who had sat next to her for every other meal they had ever shared, was ten places away. Events had put this gap between them, but things had changed deep inside their hearts as well. Each twin avoided the other’s eye. As he sat waiting for the proceedings to begin, Siggy kept himself busy by watching the sacrifices swaying in their glass showcase.

  10

  siggy

  The women had thick tights on, and the men wore trousers. When you’ve hung poor folk upside down a few times, you soon find out that rags that look decent one way up let it all hang out upside down.

  They were all criminals, poor ones. Yeah, well, the rich are more useful alive. There was a woman who had sold children as slaves to rival gangmen – to Conor, perhaps, or to the halfmen. Halfmen like human slaves. Her face had turned purple. Then there was an old man who’d been making fake money, a murderer, a rapist. The usual mix.

  And there was the big man, the spy. He’d died there alone sometime in the night. Now he hung upside down with the rest of them, his wide-brimmed hat still on his head, tied up under his chin, the tatty patched cloak hanging below his shoulders like wings, his arms tight behind him, his face black.

  Ben nudged me in the ribs and whispered, ‘Val should have hung them up with nothing on.’

  We did that occasionally, as a sort of insult. But never to the poor, only to traitors, and you have to be rich to be a traitor. Why waste a decent insult on the poor?

  I said, ‘What for?’

  He said, ‘Well, it’s a wedding feast, isn’t it?’

  There was a pause while it sank in and then we both started giggling. Bastard! We bent our heads down like we were praying and hissed and spluttered. I waited until we’d almost recovered and then I hissed back, ‘All stiff too…’ and we were off again. It was so sick! People were looking at us. Had was nudging us to be quiet. Some of Conor’s people were scowling at us so we had to bite our cheeks and shut up quick. Then I looked across and Signy was scowling at me too – as if she was one of them. And the awful thing was, she was one of them too. One night with Conor and she was all his. Kapow! Gone to the other side… Although I know that isn’t quite fair.

  I’d seen her earlier. I was… I tell you, I could hardly sleep that night, thinking about her stuck up there with him. The next morning I’d arranged to meet her in her old room. She kept me waiting hours; I was half dead with fright by the time she got there. She could have been… Well. Anything could have happened!

  Then she burst in through the door and looked at me. I said, ‘Well? Well? What happened?’ And she… she just burst out laughing, and winked at me.

  ‘Nothing for noses,’ she smirked. But then she looked serious and said, ‘He was… gentle.’

  I couldn’t believe it. I’d been sick about it all night and here she was all smiles and rosy cheeked. She looked pleased with herself. ‘You let him do it?’ I asked.

  ‘I do believe he loves me, Sigs.’

  Love! So now it was love, already! She had no idea how ludicrous it was, that she should be in love after spending one night with this…

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I told her.

  Then she started to go on about how he was different from what people said, and how his father had been the bad one and how he was really tender and sweet. Tender and sweet! How could she forget so soon? This was the guy who strung people up for coughing at the wrong time! Tender? Conor?

  It was so obvious what was going on. In love? He was using her, I knew it at once. He was spinning her a line. But she just swallowed it all down. And Val did too. I went straight to him to tell him what was going on, but when he heard that she said he loved her, he was pleased. Pleased! My father wouldn’t trust a saint if it came down to trade, but he’d believe Conor had fallen in love with his own daughter, just because it suited him.

  But… It was done and, Hel, it was her day. What could I do? I couldn’t change a second of it. I sat in my place and peered across at her, past the faces, and the cutlery, and I gave her the thumbs-up to say – I’m sorry. You’re still my sis. Even though I didn’t feel that she was any more. Signy smiled back and waved, but she didn’t look all that happy about me either.

  11

  Further down the same table, Had was watching Ben closely. His brother had stopped joking and was getting anxious. He was staring angrily at the Conor men who were twisting round to look at the spy, the big man hanging in the glass tube.

  ‘They know him! They know him, see? He was a spy…’ hissed Ben, twisting about in his chair.

  Had shook his head and leaned forward. ‘Ssssh, Ben. It doesn’t mean anything. Who wouldn’t goggle at that lot? Calm down. Nothing’s going to happen. It’s just a meal.’

  But Ben was not alone in his fears. The banquet was a tense affair. Every single guest had been searched. Every nest and nook in the high walls of the hall had been peered at, scraped clean and checked and double checked. You can forbid guns, but you can’t search out and remove the venom and suspicion of a hundred
years of war. In the end the best security was the way everyone was mixed up together. Whoever opened fire was as likely to kill their brother as their enemy.

  Siggy waved down at the huge array of cutlery spread in front of every guest. There was everything from grapefruit knives to steak knives.

  ‘I don’t know why they bothered clearing out the guns,’ he said, rattling his finger along the display. ‘We don’t need guns. We could have a cutlery massacre.’

  ‘Could we? Could they? Do you think so?’ Ben turned paler still; he was in a mess. Had banged Siggy with his elbow.

  ‘Bloody shut up,’ he hissed.

  ‘Sorry,’ muttered Siggy. He sighed and leaned back, watched the diners carefully eating the expensive food as if it was poison. Nobody could be sure it wasn’t.

  Around the top table stood big men in black suits – the bodyguards, guardian angels over immediate family members. Behind Conor stood the halfman bodyguard who had opened his car door when he arrived. He wasn’t dressed in a black suit. He didn’t need it, he was covered in sleek, close black fur. It was a safe bet there was a firearm under some of those well-pressed suits, but the halfman didn’t need a weapon. He was there only to inspire fear. Look! King Conor is guarded by halfmen!

  Each side hated the other, but the human hatred of the halfmen went far beyond that. Half bred, half manufactured, they had been designed to keep the Londoners trapped in their city. It was as much the prospect of wiping out the halfmen as escaping the city that had led Val to try to join forces with Conor.

  Had leaned across and whispered to his brothers, ‘The word is, Conor didn’t capture it – he brewed it. He has a glass womb from Ragnor.’

  And what was the recipe? Steel bones, the teeth of a wolf? How much hatred, how much fear? You could make anything if you had the technology. But there were many there that day who believed it was not possible to make a halfman loyal to a human, especially to Conor, who was known to cross the Wall and hunt the things for sport.

  Siggy stared at the creature. Its great head must have weighed a hundredweight, but it sat on the huge, thick neck like a little rubber ball. There was quite a bit of dog in the brewing of this one, judging by the thin waist and huge barrel chest and narrow shoulders.

  The halfman looked right back at him, loosened a great, long, pink tongue and began to pant.

  *

  As course followed course and glass followed glass, things livened up. It was, after all, the feast of a lifetime.

  Val had handed the whole thing over to Al Karr, a smuggler – trader they called it by then – through the halfman lands from the wide world beyond. Val came from the old days. When he was a boy they were still fighting the halfmen, there was no trading. He’d worked his way up from nothing, and it was only thirty years ago he didn’t know what a bottle of wine looked like. The idea of having money to waste – he couldn’t get his head around it. Spend the stuff on weapons, buildings, schools – fine, sure. But he still winced at the thought of paying for smuggled wine.

  Al did his job well. There was everything you could have dreamed about, as far as food and drink went. The chefs had been making edible works of art for days – lizards made of stuffed chickens, prawn and lobster dragons, sculptures of moulded rice, peacocks, little buildings made of chops, pictures of Val and Conor and their victories past and present, made out of sliced meat and salads. Every time a new dish made an entrance, there was a round of applause. But Val himself was scandalised, even though he knew it would be like this. His head was twisting about on his neck like a top as he tried to add up the cost and failed.

  Al had even somehow managed to get his hands on a camel, which he’d had roasted, humps and all. It was curled up with its legs underneath it and its head held up as in life. It was decorated with some sort of jelly piped on in about twenty different colours. The camel looked as if it was on drugs. It was glorious, ridiculous and hilarious. The waiters wheeled it round the hall on a trolley before it got carved up. You could hear the roars of laughter as it went round the hall.

  At the end came the ringing of the bell.

  Val’s men were trying to keep their faces straight – those of them who weren’t scared for their ears. Conor and his people knew it was going to happen; it was just too dangerous with the nervous bodyguard to suddenly let off something that looked so much like a disaster. It had been explained – how, what, why, where. But Conor’s men had no idea, really. No one could. Even if you’d heard it before it still made your hair stand on end. It wasn’t just the noise. The sight of it was terrifying on its own.

  A vast steel girder had been salvaged from one of the city’s skyscrapers. It weighed well over a hundred tonnes and it hung like a whale in the ocean of the great hall, high in the air, a hundred metres up above the heads of the diners in a cloud of tobacco smoke and dust, on a network of cables. At each end of it were two great, fat, steel hawsers. They ran from the ends of the girder to great winching machines, mounted on the walls of the hall.

  This girder, which was as big as any cathedral bell, was the clapper.

  The girder was wound slowly across the great space towards the walls. All the time the diners were eating it was being dragged through the air, metre by metre, as if part of the building itself were moving above them. At last it nestled close to the walls. The rest was simple. The winching mechanism was released, and the great beam swung through the air like a landslide in space.

  You could hear the air get out of the way as the girder began its journey. It was so big it looked slow, the way a plane looks slow when it passes overhead. But it was going like a train. The air was hissing in fright and that dead weight was swinging down from heaven like the falling moon. You might have seen it all a hundred times, but when you saw it move you were certain the roof was coming down! You were dead already. You were going to get crushed like a damp pea.

  Not only that, but look! The beam was heading straight for the lift shaft…

  Conor’s men cringed, they lifted their hands over their heads and backed off with nowhere to go. At any second the beam would strike and a blizzard of glass shrapnel would rain down around them.

  The beam struck, and it bounced off that glass with a crack like the back of the world was being snapped. The glass tube twitched. Colours ran all over it, like oil leaking suddenly, flushes of colours in a hundred palettes. And the lift shaft sang.

  The hundred-tonne girder was the clapper; the lift shaft was a tubular bell. And the whole building was the bell tower.

  The sound was like the earth howling. Everyone had their fingers in their ears – they’d been told to. Even the bodyguards stood there with their fingers in, eyes rolling around to spot if anyone was going to try anything while their hands were busy. The lift shaft boomed and howled; every millimetre of air was packed with noise until it overflowed. The halfman bodyguard curled up into a ball and howled like he’d seen death coming to get him, but no one could hear a thing. On the table, the wine trembled in the glasses, the cutlery rattled. High overhead, sheets of dust began to descend. As it caught the light it looked like angels from heaven coming down in a blaze of glory, although it was only dirt.

  But the strangest thing of all when the bell rang was the behaviour of the dead. They began to move. Their arms lifted, their heads shaking as if to say, no, no. They began to twist and writhe on their ropes and crosses. There was a sprinkling of bones as some of the older ones fell to pieces. As the sound began to die down, this strange phenomenon carried on, and every head in the hall turned to watch it. The wine stilled in the glasses into little rings. The dust arrived among the wedding guests and people flung their napkins over their food to protect it, but the dead still moved. For minutes after, when the noise was just a hum, they continued their macabre dance among the cables, turning and peering this way and that, victims of sub-sonic noises and the forces running up and down the lift shaft.

  Their movements became slower and weaker until at last they hung quiet and still and
the wedding guests turned away to resume their meals or talk with their neighbours about what they had just seen. But soon they turned back for another look. Something was happening that no one had ever seen before.

  One of the dead refused to stay still.

  It was the man with one eye. The body was still twisting his head this way and that, with its terrible smears of blood and its one dull eye. His arms seemed to have come loose from the bonds behind his back, and now he was lifting them into the air. He turned his head. Remarkable! Then suddenly he bent at the waist and reached up to seize the beam where his foot was nailed.

  People jumped up and screamed. This was impossible! In a second all eyes were on the dead man. It was like a dream that wouldn’t stop. When he tore out the nail with a single tug of his hands it was clear that he was coming back to life.

  The screams died away one by one and a thick stillness descended on the hall. The dead man was reaching out to grasp the cables by his feet. Then, slowly, slowly, hanging by his hands, he dropped his feet until he was the right way up. There he hung for a while, staring down at the diners like a great black bird.

  Outside, in the hall, people began to murmur, voices to be raised. But Val stood up and flung back his arm.

  ‘Quiet! It seems we have a visitor…’ And the hall fell silent again.

  Had leaned across to his brothers and hissed, ‘It must be a machine after all!’ But already the blood had begun to flow again from the man’s back. His face, which had been black as a clot of blood, began to turn red.

  The dead man swayed slightly, hanging by his hands. He was looking down at the cabling below him, as if he was working out how to get down. The silence in the hall had grown so deep it was like the bottom of the ocean in there. The man’s face was in the shadow of that wide hat, but even so you could see his one eye glittering – just like the eye of a machine, in fact.